The Tweedledum and Tweedledee Star Clusters: an unplanned treat

The Tweedledum(NGC 6633) and Tweedledee(IC 4756) Star Clusters are a pair of open star clusters located over 1000 light-years away. Tweedledum is located in the constellation of Ophiuchus while Tweedledee is located in the constellation of Serpens. They got their names from the twin characters, Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Lewis Carrol’s book, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, and they were named so because of their close proximity in the sky.

If you were wondering what an open star cluster is, an open star cluster is a group of stars that formed together from the same material and are gravitationally bound to each other. They often are made up of thousands of stars but can contain even more.

The day I took the picture of these two star clusters, I was originally planning on trying to take pictures of the Pinwheel Galaxy, which is also known as M101, but I was struggling to find exactly where it was with my DSLR. Since I live close to the city, I get a lot of light pollution which makes it harder for me to find fainter objects. Eventually, when I did find it’s location, it didn’t show up in the shots I took, so I was reluctant to actually take the hundreds of shots that are necessary to reach the final image. I then proceeded to try and find another star cluster that I had in mind as a backup plan. Unluckily though, I realized that it was being obscured by a bunch of trees so, there was no chance that I could photograph it.

At this point, I was growing annoyed and I had no other options left. This was not long after I got my intervalometer(a device that automatically takes the photos for you, so that you don’t have to keep clicking the shutter button for every picture), and I wanted a chance to use it. It was a warm summer night and I had plenty of free time, so I decided that instead of going inside, I would point my camera to a random part of the sky and take some pictures until I found something interesting. After a few shots, I found a small cluster of stars that looked interesting so I decided to take shots of it. Originally I wanted to take a couple of dozen shots before moving on but by the end of it, I had taken about 200 shots of the star cluster. I went inside and put them in an image stacking software and let it stack the images. After it was finished I took a look at the final result, but I didn’t do much editing. The next morning I edited the picture using GIMP(a free photo editing software) until I was satisfied.

The photo before editing

My photo after my first edit. The star cluster to the left is Tweedledee while the star cluster to right is Tweedledum.

That’s when I realized that there were two star clusters in my photo. I quickly went on Stellarium(a star map software) and searched in the area of the sky where I pointed my camera. I found a pair of star clusters, that looked just like the ones I took pictures of, and when I clicked on them to see their name, I learned that they were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I compared my picture with pictures on the internet, I was pretty happy so I just left it as it was for months.

Then came December. A few weeks ago, I got Adobe Photoshop and I wanted to try and use it. I had been using free software until then, so I wanted to see how Photoshop was better. I went through my old photos to look for something to edit. I then tried to edit my photo of Andromeda, but it didn’t look any different from the pictures I had. So then I decided to see if I could get more stars in my Tweedledum and Tweedledee picture. I was already happy with it, but I wanted to see if I could edit it better. The last time I did photo editing for it, tried to make the sky a dark as possible, but in the process, some of the faint stars got removed. This time, I solely focused on bringing out more stars. I got to work, and after messing with the curves and levels of the image, I got what I wanted.

My Final Edit of the Tweedledee and Tweedledum Star Clusters.

This time I managed to get a lot more stars, and the ones that were already there were brighter. Plus, it also looks more natural so I'm pretty happy with how it came out. Though things don’t always go as planned, sometimes that can actually be a good thing like it was for me.